The Best American Essays 2019 by Rebecca SolnitMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
As a long-time annual reader of this collection, I could tell something would be different this year from the very beginning. Series editor Robert Atwan – whom, I am happy to boast is an acquaintance who’s been warm and supportive in the decade or so I’ve known him – opens this year with reflections not on his go-to essay/definer in Montaigne but instead on George Orwell.
That’s a crucial difference since Montaigne represents a tradition of the essay concerned with the self, the self working outward to understand the world, while Orwell represents the political essay, the essay that explores some changing aspect of the cultural or partisan political world as it affects the self.
That difference is even more fully underlined in Rebecca Solnit’s powerful introduction. As she puts it thoughtfully and articulately, “I was assigned to pick out the best of the very good essays we gathered, and for me that meant not only the integrity of the writing and the writers’ visions, but essays that engaged with the most important and conflicted stuff of our time.”
The result, then, is that the “best essays” selected here are overwhelmingly direct and political in their focus. Solnit justifies that by arguing that our moment is so partisan, so conflicted, that writing that fails to take a direct stand against what we might call, for short-hand, Trumpism is somehow complicit in pretending that things aren’t so riven.
So, I do hear the justification, and I can’t help but be persuaded by some of it. In such a context, an annual event like the Best American Essays ought to be a forum for amplifying some of the powerful voices plumbing the socio-political crisis of the moment.
And yet…I admit that I come to this series for a particular aesthetic experience. I have never yet tired of Montaigne and all he represents. There is something fragile in the personal essay, something that allows a particular human to give the rest of us a sense of her or his or their self as it opens into the larger world. Hearing Solnit’s rationale, I can’t argue otherwise, but I do miss the personal-essay-centered approach of my favorite iterations of this series.
Put differently, I am not asking for an escape from the political; even if I were that naïve, I couldn’t continue to be so after reading Solnit’s introduction. Instead, I believe there is a subtler politics that grows out of allowing artists to explore their experience without the initial insistence that they wrestle with the ills we all (or all of us at all likely to pick up such a volume) already recognize.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment